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The Philosophy of Ecology and Sustainability: New Logical and Informational Dimensions

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The Philosophy of Ecology and Sustainability: New Logical and Informational Dimensions philosophies Article The Philosophy of Ecology and Sustainability: New Logical and Informational Dimensions Joseph E. Brenner International Center for the Philosophy of Information, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’An 710049, China; [email protected] Received: 7 April 2018; Accepted: 24 May 2018; Published: 31 May 2018 Abstract: Ecology and sustainability are current narratives about the behavior of humans toward themselves and the environment. Ecology is defined as a science, and a philosophy of ecology has become a recognized domain of the philosophy of science. For some, sustainability is an accepted, important moral goal. In 2013, a Special Issue of the journal Sustainability dealt with many of the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the economic, ideological, and psychological barriers to ethical behavior and corresponding social action remain great as well as obvious. In this paper, I propose that a new, non-standard and non-propositional logic of real processes, Logic in Reality (LIR) grounded in physics applies to the science and philosophy of these narratives and helps to explicate them. Given the ecological role of organizations and institutions, reference is often made to organizational or institutional logics as guides to ecological practice. This paper suggests that these logics are either too abstract or too informal to have an impact in a conflictual world. Recognition of the suggested new, transdisciplinary logical dimension of ecological processes may provide credibility and support to new initiatives in ecology and its philosophy. Keywords: common good; contradiction; ecology; ethics; information; logic; philosophy; science; sustainability; transdisciplinarity 1. Introduction Ecology or ecological science is an approach to a better understanding of the complex interrelationships between humans and their environment. It is a necessary part of any effort to respond to the resistance and barriers to ecological progress and achieve the goal of a sustainable world. Concomitantly, the necessity of managing the explosive expansion of scientific knowledge and the ‘infosphere’ of communication is apparent. The concept proposed in the 1990s by Capurro and others, of an Informational Ecology as a global ecology of intellectual resources, now would include ‘natural’ ecology and sustainability themselves as domains of knowledge. Further, Zhong and his colleagues in China have recently drawn attention to their version of an Information Ecology that focuses on the ecological characteristics of Information Studies. In this paper, I propose that what has been missing in these approaches is a rationale for sustainability and ecology in the basic physics of our world. In the mid-20th Century, the Franco-Romanian thinker Stéphane Lupasco proposed a non-propositional logic that can describe the evolution of interactive processes at biological, cognitive, and social levels of human reality. I suggest that the dualism between altruism and selfishness, which is reflected in attitudes toward the environment, can be described by this logic and that this description, as a ‘positivity factor’ may contribute to predominance of the former. I start in Section2 with a summary of relevant recent developments in sustainability and philosophy of ecology. Section3 introduces the topic of the philosophy of ecology and Section4 discusses the problem of logic in relation to the realities of ecology and sustainability. Because of its unfamiliarity as well as its significant role in this paper, I provide in Section5 a minimum overview Philosophies 2018, 3, 16; doi:10.3390/philosophies3020016 www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies Philosophies 2018, 3, 16 2 of 21 of my Logic in Reality (LIR). In Section6, I refer briefly to the concepts of natural computation and ‘infocomputationalism’ as alternative rigorous approaches to digital aspects of sustainability. Section7 reviews some of the prior work on information and information ecology and relates it to LIR. Section8 looks more in detail, from the LIR perspective, at current work on the Ecology of Information Studies and Section9 at Sustainability and the Psychology of Moral Responsibility. Scientific and philosophical debate about the need to preserve the environment has become a matter of survival. The definition of new relevant forms of philosophy and logic that are relevant to this debate requires a delicate balance between use of established forms and the reasoned introduction of new concepts, structures, and definitions. However, when standard current definitions of logic and philosophy are what are being called into question, as in this paper, they cannot themselves be used as criteria for its evaluation. My answers to the valuable comments, negative as well as positive, of the four reviews of the first version of this paper will all be based on this metaphilosophical position (MPP). Sustainability and the Digital Environment This paper was stimulated in part by two recent Summit Conferences on Information organized by the International Society for Studies of Information (IS4SI): Response and Responsibility in the Information Sciences, Vienna, 2015 and Digitalization for a Sustainable Society, Gothenburg, 2017. The latter included a panel discussion specifically entitled “Sustainability in the Digital World”, moderated by Anna Dubois. Here, Sustainability was understood as comprising social, economic/business, and technical sustainability as well as environmental sustainability, domains of course not totally separated or separable. The hopefully rhetorical question asked was whether the final goal of digitalization was an increase in productivity per se or in the net benefits to the society of that productivity. Section7 of this paper addresses some of the relevant issues. 2. Sustainability and Ecology 2.1. What Is ‘Ecology’? In an Editorial in Science in 2015 [1], David Inouye, President of the Ecological Society of America, described the new paradigms that have emerged from basic ecological research and the “dramatic growth” of the role of ecology in the society. “With newly developed tools, analytical methods and models to forecast the future of the world’s environment, ecologists can inform policy-makers about how to prevent, mitigate or adapt to environmental change.” Inouye stated that the science of ecology was about interactions between and relationships among organisms and habitats, on all scales and how they provide information to help understand our world. I argue here that to understand and support ecology and its role, further understanding is also necessary of the physical nature and operation of such dynamic interactions in nature, including human society. Despite the success of digital tools in offering new scientific and philosophical perspectives here and in other sciences, one must ask what other perspectives might help to understand the resistance to implementation of ecological that is, ethical policies in favor of the common good—a sustainable society. My discussion of the ‘foundations of ecology’ clarifies one definition at least. In the American Heritage Dictionary, ecology is: 1. the science of the relationships between organisms and their environments; 2. the relationships between organisms and their environments. As we will see, it is an explicit tenet of Logic in Reality that two such systems or levels of discourse are not separate but interact and inform one another. This clarifies other usages of the ‘E-word’: • Categorial use—information ecology, communication ecology Philosophies 2018, 3, 16 3 of 21 • Adjectival use—ecological context, issue, point, system, questions, quality, dangers, theory, challenge, crisis, etc. • Adverbial use—ecologically protected, considered (attitude or stance) In any event, the underlying valence of ecological is positive, referring to a way of functioning for the common good. This sense will underlie the various usages in the remainder of this paper. 2.2. The Science In the last few years, two related processes affecting human existence have been established with increasing scientific validity: anthropogenic global warming and anthropogenic destruction and unsustainable misuse of natural resources. The resistance of some people to acceptance of a scientific explanation of these processes is an extremely complex phenomenon. It has components of ignorance, greed and political ambition, pretense, and, even perhaps, some bona fide religious belief. The major assumption of my analysis of this issue is that the anti-social behavior consequent on this resistance is a scientific fact itself, discussable with reference to individual and collective psychology and its dynamics. From a political perspective, one argument would be that what has been called the ‘late-capitalist’ system institutionalizes greed by intensifying the ‘closure’ of social groups, as the systems and information scientist Wolfgang Hofkirchner has described [2]. The ‘solution’ proposed by many is to change capitalist society to something more social, but this kind of gratuitous comment is part of the problem. It begs the question of who is to do the changing and if and on what basis it could be successful. For purposes of discussion, I claim that the polarizations of human beings-in-society—left and right, altruistic and selfish, finally social and anti-social, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the old terminology are embedded in the genome and, logically, will always be instantiated in society. Two categories of people will always exist, with the balance of power shifting cyclically from one to the other,
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